At some point, Australians stopped grieving Harold Holt’s death and many started to laugh about it instead. The sudden disappearance of a prime minister at a Victorian beach in December 1967 has furnished many wisecracks and memes. Former Cronulla Sharks coach Jack Gibson famously said that waiting for the team to win was like “leaving a porch light on for Harold Holt”.
The Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Pool in Malvern, commemorated in his honour in 1969, attracts its fair share of mirth. So do the conspiracy theories, deeply unserious as they are, of “double agent” Holt’s abduction by a Chinese submarine. A few years ago, Holt’s grandson pointed out that Cheviot beach was “too shallow for such a vessel”, and the late prime minister “wasn’t a fan of Chinese cuisine” anyway.
For all its comic potential today, Harold Holt’s disappearance was no joke at the time.
